3 Ways to Get Your Kids Excited About Going Back to School

Did you know that over the summer period children can lose over 60% of what they learnt in the previous academic year? It’s no wonder that after 6 weeks of summer holiday children can find returning to school and academic work really boring. Their brains have completely switched off and they need stimulation to get back on ON!

However, the back to school period need not be filled with drama. Here are a few handy tips to make the whole family more positive and excited about returning once again to school-life.

1. Pre-planning and anticipating the daily routine.

One of the first things that families can do is to start getting accustomed to the daily-schedule. For example, it is a good idea to start getting up and going to bed at school times and to also get meal-times the same as school lunch times. This will make it much easier for children to be ready for the school rhythm. Going cold-turkey and pulling a child from a holiday routine to a school routine will prove more challenging and stressful for all the family.

2. Start talking about the subjects that they are going to study.

This doesn’t need to be an an overly academic way. You can introduce some fun games or apps that they can start to play with that relate to the subject. You can ask them to set the goals that they would like to achieve on the subject. What do they want to learn? Tell them about the things that they will learn and relate it to the real world.

Talk to them about what they hope to accomplish and also express your expectations. Then, together, set goals and make a plan on how you’re going to achieve them. Remember to follow up on the goals and achievements so that children are motivated and aware of their targets.

3. Begin to incorporate lessons and school work into the week.

During the end of the summer holidays and beginning of the school term, you can do this in a number of ways. You can start using apps that enhance learning skills. For example there are apps that you can use that will make the subjects fun and inspiring. Here are a few that we found earlier:

MoMA Art Lab is an app that has been derived from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). The app lets learners create their very own inspired by the art that is already in the museum. It is the perfect app to introduce children to masterful works of contemporary art as well as encouraging development of learners’ own communication skills.

The Pompeii and Herculaneum app is another app that has been inspired from a museum. The British Museum’s Pompeii exhibition is currently one of the most comprehensive displays of Roman life and details about the volcano eruption. This is a an app that really engages the learner and the British Museum has done a fantastic job of enhancing its own content outside of the museum. You will be gripped just as if you were reading a thriller novel!

King of Maths is an app that will get even the number-haters gripped. The app assumes that you know the concepts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, geometry etc..) in order to play the games in the app. However, it only takes the learner as far as he/she knows. Therefore, it will be necessary to have a little lesson beforehand if you want to take the learner further in the maths topics. Despite this, the time constraint and reward elements in the game means that the learner will become very addicted to getting the right answers. Who would have thought that a maths app could be so hard to put down?

Clicker Sentences is one of the best apps for English writing. It is a little more expensive than the other apps but it has a long life-time value as it can improve alongside the development of the learner. The aim is to refine writing skills and grammar practice. The best thing is that learners can take pictures, upload them into the app and create stories around them. So, not only does the app encourage practising language skills but, it has the potential to act as story-telling and diary app.